The attempted bombings in London and the attack on Glasgow Airport last week
underscore the continued and long-term Islamic terror threat that Britain and
the world is facing. To date, all of those detained are highly educated
foreign-born medical staff.

Far from
being affronted by this incursion, young British Muslims are increasingly likely
to support domestic jihad. The radicalization of British Muslim youth proceeds
apace. According to a recent poll by Populus, growing numbers of Muslims aged
16-30 subscribe to extreme versions of Islam, and almost 40 percent want to live
under Shariah law. Britain faces the prospect of a whole new generation of young
people embracing extremism and religious fanaticism.

So far, the
government has refrained from introducing more Draconian legislation. Instead,
Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his ministerial colleagues have promised to
reinforce the government’s campaign “to win the hearts and minds of the
Muslim community.”

However, like Tony Blair’s sterile appeal to moderate, mainstream Islam, this
strategy is bound to fail because of two fatal assumptions.

First, that every culture and every religion wants to become like the secular
West.Second, resistance to Western secularization is fueled by false grievances
and as such can be legitimately ignored.

In
practice, this sort of approach marginalizes traditional Islam in favor of an
ersatz “progressive” version that robs it of all its distinctive character and
vision. The litmus test for integration is whether Muslims are willing to be
like “us.” Unsurprisingly, many young Muslims are increasingly alienated by an
aggressively secular culture that enforces liberal transgression of moral norms
and taboos.

Crucially,
current policies are not working because they fail to address the real cause of
radicalization and fanaticism. Contemporary Islamic violence is religious in
nature. Its origin lies in Islamic scripture and the destruction of the
traditional medieval schools that dictated its interpretation.

The Koran
contains clear and lethal injunctions against apostates, idolaters and those who
challenge Muslim territorial ascendancy. While the sacred texts do sanctify
violence - they also codify it, limiting its range and application.

Thus, there
is no legitimation in classical Islam for suicide bombing or the wanton
slaughter of innocents. [I am sure this opinion is far from universal.]That
said, warfare and a consequent defense and extension of Islam was both a
religious duty and a scriptural requirement, albeit one framed by chivalry and
relative restraint.

Moreover,
unlike the claims of contemporary fundamentalists, there never really was a
unified political/religious authority in Islam. On the contrary, the role of
religious scholars (the ulama) was to limit the power of the caliphs.

And since
there were four traditional schools of religious interpretation, which
themselves varied according to time and location, what constituted a proper
Islamic practice varied according to local norms and customs. As such
traditional Islam prohibits the very totalitarian state Al Qaeda seeks to
impose.

For
example, if Islam recovers the traditional practice of ijtihad, a process
of textual reinterpretation that replaces the scriptural literalism of the
fundamentalists with a more medieval allegorical reading of the Koran, this
would enable the Muslim faithful to distinguish between immutable God-given laws
and mutable human interpretations.

It is
worth stating all of this because the only force that can challenge Islamic
terrorism is not liberal progressivism but Islam itself. Those who have
abandoned terrorism did so not as a result of secular injunctions or indeed
horror at what they were doing. Rather, it was the realization that the variant
of Islam they were killing for was itself Western, modern and secular.

The great
innovators of Islamic fundamentalism - Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi - were
deeply influenced by pagan Nazi literature and its supremacist critiques of
modern life and culture. Demonstration of the essentially blasphemous nature of
contemporary fundamentalism is crucial for the deprogramming of its adherents.

However,
the mere rebirth of classical Islam is not enough. Islam in both its Sunni and
Shiite derivations suffers from an absolutist unmediated relation to God. Since
faith is separated from reason and nature it becomes a self-authenticating
phenomenon that invalidates all other perspectives.

What is
really required is the revival of Sufism - a practice previously common to all
forms of the faith and one that stresses the mystical unknowable nature of God
and His transcendence of all forms of human knowledge.

Such a
recognition deprives Islamic fundamentalism of its primary motivating principle
- that it knows the will of God and is therefore justified in enforcing it upon
the earth.

A renewal
of Sufism could help Islam to broaden its understanding of authority beyond
rulers and the ulama to include civil society. This would also restore the
consensus of the community (ijma). And thereby empower Muslim society to
challenge the fundamentalist assertions of its heretical preachers with reasoned
belief.

Given that
we are losing the battle of hearts and minds, we would be well advised to chart
a different path. By encouraging an Islamic renaissance and reviving traditions
that the fundamentalists have so violently suppressed, Muslim youth might be
diverted from their present course.

Phillip
Blond is a senior lecturer in philosophy and religion at the University of
Cumbria, Adrian Pabst is a lecturer in theology at the University of Nottingham